2 of 3
For the first three-fourths of this essay, Bushman tackles an interesting question in a plausible way. But as he winds up, the reader is reminded that the essay was originally delivered in a lecture series sponsored by the LDS Commissioner of Education. Bushman avers that Smith did little to answer his critics' calls for proof of his prophethood because two early revelations to the Mormon church stated, "Require not miracles" and "He that seeketh signs shall see signs, but not unto salvation." Smith stood on revelation alone. So, it turns out, does Bushman. In his concluding remarks, he quotes the Mormon Book of Alma and asserts, "The Latter-day Saint answer to skepticism is not conventional evidence. … We ask that skeptics listen to the testimonies of believers who trust God because they have experienced power and truth."
Bushman makes similar turns in all of these essays, except the first four, which consist of spiritual autobiography from beginning to end. The Book of Mormon answers for itself in the five essays on "The Book of Mormon and History," and quotations from Mormon Scriptures permeate the eight essays on "Joseph Smith and Culture" as well. Such frequent reference is, in one sense, only natural. The Book of Mormon would be a key primary source for anyone seeking to understand the book, its author, or the church founded upon it. Still, as all history graduate students hear repeatedly, primary sources are not transparent—they must be read actively and critically, with attention to both what they say and what they do not say. Historians cannot automatically believe everything they read. In the case of the Book of Mormon, though, Bushman, as a faithful Latter-day Saint, must.
On this topic of primary sources, Mormon scholars have a significant advantage and a significant disadvantage in relation to, say, evangelical scholars. The advantage is archives. Latter-day Saints are renowned for meticulous record keeping, and none of their print documents is more than 200 years old. Thus Mormons have hard evidence of almost everything that happened in the early years of their church, while evangelicals have to make do with text fragments and archaeology. On the flip side, Mormons base their faith on rather recent miracles and revelations, plus a book that had the misfortune to appear as textual criticism hit its stride. An evangelical historian can write a lot about faith in the 19th century without having to broach subjects like the supernatural or the inspiration of Scripture. A Mormon historian lacks the luxury of compartmentalizing such questions.
To some observers, compartmentalization is the great weakness of the new, "respectable" evangelical histories. In a 1997 essay, "On Critical History," Bruce Kuklick deemed the efforts of Marsden and others to write Christian history by the rules of the academy a "pact with the devil." Such work might win accolades from nonbelievers, but at the expense of a unique Christian voice. Kuklick—himself a nonbeliever—called his evangelical colleagues to put up or shut up. Christians request a place at the academic table on the basis of possessing special insight into the true workings of the world, he wrote. "But how are Christians to show this? How can they show how God peeps through in history? If Christian convictions lend no such insight, if they are not cashed out, they are worthless."1
Bushman certainly rises to Kuklick's challenge. He writes, of his key primary source, "The genius of the Book of Mormon, like that of many works of art, is that it brings an entire society and culture into existence, with a religion, an economy, a technology, a government, a geography, a sociology, all combined into a complete world." Bushman inhabits that world. He draws all of his questions into it, and all of his answers emanate from it. This is not to say that Bushman cannot wield the tools of the historical trade. He has demonstrated his skills in his non-Mormon writings, and he demonstrates them at only a slightly lower level in these essays, nearly all of which were originally crafted as lectures and consequently move at a much faster clip than monographs. But, in this volume at least, Bushman is a Mormon first and a historian second. Kuklick and company could ask for nothing more, right?
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